Three Time Saving Tips for Busy Supermom & Superdad Agents

Let’s face it, you’re busy. Between running your business, handling the needs of your clients, and taking care of your home and family—supermom & superdad real estate agents often feel like they are going in fifty directions at once. No matter what our super powers are, until they invent a cloning machine, you can only ever be in one place, doing one thing, at any given time. This presents some frustrating dilemmas for managing our real estate business.  

When you add up the time you need to be prospecting, meeting with past clients and sphere, managing social media, going on appointments, prepping for appointments, managing your database, managing your business expenses, networking etc., you quickly figure out that the hours needed and the hours available don’t always mesh. Especially if, like me, you have school age kids that also require a significant chunk of your time! After fourteen years in the business as a supermom agent, I have learned a few tricks to keep my business flowing when my super powers come up short.  

1. CREATING A TIMEBLOCK SYSTEM THAT WORKS…FOR YOU 

There are so many rigid timeblock suggestions for agents. You know the ones that start the prospecting portion of your day at 7 or 8 AM. I am sure those work fantastic if you don’t have kids to get out the door to school. Appointment blocks at 3PM, hmmm, only on days I want to shell out for after-care. As a supermom agent, I find many of these “ideal agent timeblocking” schedules to be geared for people that don’t have those delightfully demanding tax deductions, i.e. children. I would try to follow them and feel completely defeated when I couldn’t make it work for me. After years of trying to follow a schedule created by another agent, I decided to stop being defeated and created a timeblock system that works for me. Me, the supermom and me, the agent.  

If you find yourself struggling to follow your timeblocks, it is time to look at why they aren’t working. As Jim Rohn said, “If you don’t like how things are, change it. You are not a tree.” There is no right or wrong way to timeblock. The best timeblock system is like the best CRM, it is the one you use! The most important thing is just to timeblock. Timeblocking puts you in control of your schedule and eliminates a ton of stress in the process. Put your fixed appointments in (family or business), the pick-up/drop off times for schools and activities – then add in the important tasks. 

2. FOCUS ON YOUR PRIMARY GOALS

There are hundreds of tasks that we, as agents, get wrapped up in on a daily basis. Everyone is out there telling you the five hundred different things you need to do to be successful in real estate. Touch your sphere. Be social…on social media. Get involved in your community. Farm. Network. Have coffee. Go to lunch. Call people four hours a day! Go on appointments. Review the MLS. Get those ads posted. Preview listings. Do that open house. Take that CE class. Instagram. Did you go live at your open house? Post the pictures from closing. Share. Not too much. Call your sphere. Ask for referrals. Did you send those just listed cards? The just sold? The buyer need letter? Door knock? Hand deliver those open house invites? Pop Bys! Personal, handwritten notes. Oh, and while you’re at it, get your house cleaned, make dinner, get the kids to the game (where you should be networking), make sure homework is done, laundry anyone! …Seriously. I am still trying to figure out if I am supposed to be a sleepless zombie supermom agent or maybe trying to do everything has us missing the important things. 

If your goal is to take two listings a month, focus on that goal. Go on four listing appointments a month. That is only one per week. We can do that. We can get one appointment with one human who may want to sell their house a week. If you focused on that first, once you put that appointment into your calendar you have won the week. Now everything else on that list of five hundred things becomes things you do to fill the pipeline for the future. It’s the frosting, not the cake. The appointments are the cake. If you don’t have the cake, you have nothing to frost. Focus on the cake. Hmmm…I’m suddenly craving cake. Anyone have a good gluten-free chocolate cake recipe? 

3. CREATIVELY CRUSHING LEAD GENERATION TIMEBLOCKS

No matter what the source of your business, at some point every supermom and superdad agent has to pick up the phone or turn on the dialer and make some calls. Some days I’m lucky if I can find an hour to make calls. After determining I was unable to manufacture time, I had to find a way to increase the effectiveness of my prospecting blocks. So what is a busy supermom or superdad agent to do when the very laws of physics—neigh, time and space itself—gets in the way of phone prospecting? I call the Doctor, hop in the T.A.R.D.I.S., and make that hour last days…I wish. No, I search out new frontiers and new ways to prospect. Enter Slydialing… 

There are many services like slybroadcast.com that, for a small fee, will dump messages into a voicemail box. It is a beautiful thing. This allows me to double the effectiveness of my prospecting time by having 20-100 sly messages drop 30 minutes into my prospecting calls. Now I have touched that many more people. They call back – I can dial and field incoming calls at the same time. It causes a little telephone tag but the same thing happens when I leave messages as I am calling so not a big issue. I can exponentially increase my call volume by doing this. I can also grab my results and call everyone who wasn’t left a message after the slybroadcast. It makes one hour of prospecting as effective as two or more. And I didn’t even need a time machine to do it! 

Who do I call? FSBO’s, past clients, open house invitees…ANYONE! Anyone can be called this way. Want to reach out to 1000 people in your sphere to wish them a happy whatever holiday it is…drop 250 a day for four days. Why limit the size of the drops – well if you leave 1000 messages and a bunch of people call you back in the first 30 minutes – your phone will blow up and your voicemail box will fill up…fast! Less is more in this situation. 

GET YOUR SANITY BACK 

There are so many different distractions for the busy supermom and superdad agents and so many different ways to create success in real estate. You just have to remember you don’t have to do all of them at once. If you get so wrapped up in the day to day that you lose sight of the whole reason you are working so hard, you will look up one day to find your kids grown and wonder where the time went. Take control! Take back your life by using timeblocking, focusing on your primary goals, and doubling your prospecting effectiveness. You can have your cake and eat it too. And if you are feeling generous, share it with the kids!